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KKVB STORY - read here!

This is the story of the project The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor.

Description step by step of the process that led to the realization of the community garden and the community kitchen and to the involvement of local residents.

Pictures OOZE

Text Lucia Babina

Choice of Location

In 2008 Wilde Westen were commissioned by a coalition of public authorities, private investors and the Chamber of Commerce of Amsterdam to carry out 6 months of research on the theme of Bedrijventuin (the Entrepreneurial Garden City). The purpose was to find new opportunities for the economic and structural growth of an area in decline: New West Amsterdam. The outcome of this research was the formation of a strategy that diverted from the expectations of the coalition and instead interwove the cultural, social, economic and spatial development of the area by involving local inhabitants as the main resource for sustainable transformation. This strategy did not satisfy the coalition as such, but Wilde Westen was convinced by it, and chose to implement it through the launch of a pilot project.

Soon after the research was completed, Wilde Westen met with Marjetica Potrč – who had in the meantime been asked by the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam to realise a site-specific project in New West Amsterdam - and together they decided to collaborate on a participatory project about cooking and farming. Marjetica spent December 2008 in New West Amsterdam conducting investigations; at the end of which she and Wilde Westen set about looking for a starting point for the project. With the help of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, who had agreed to work with Wilde Westen as well, they found two possible options: a store front in Slotervaart owned by the housing corporation Eigen Haard; and a shop in Geuzenved and Slotermeer owned by the housing corporation Far West.

The first option was a far bigger space and was better situated but was not directly connected to a green area; the second option had the disadvantage of being a small, dark and damp butcher’s shop, abandoned for almost 10 years, but with a communal garden (kijk groen) at the rear of the building which was perfect for a community vegetable plot. A unanimous choice was made in favour of this former halal butchery. The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and the Neighbour settled down in Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61.

The Site
The shop in Lodewijk van Deysslestraat consisted of a ground floor space of 30 m2. When we entered it for the first time the side and rear windows were boarded up, walls were rotten and covered with tiles, the hydraulic system was broken and the mezzanine was inaccessible. It needed a refurbishment from top to bottom. By contrast the garden behind was well maintained but felt very desolate. It was fenced off as a kijk-groen type. Although a communal garden for which local residents pay a monthly maintenance fee, it was closed to them; no one had the keys apart from the housing corporation and garden keeper, Rochdale. In New West Amsterdam there is a lot of vacant space and a big percentage of it is occupied by greenery, but this greenery is just space, it is not public, not available, not inhabited. This evident void - spread throughout the district and tangibly represented by a shop deliberately kept empty for 10 years and a deserted garden - inspired us to fill it with our dream of making space for the local community, of creating a place for everybody to use and to appropriate. So we set about designing a collective cooking and farming hub together with local residents.

Contacting the Neighbourhood
During her stay in Amsterdam in December 2008, Marjetica Potrč was introduced to many people from Niew West Amsterdam by her assistant Dasha van Amsterdam (Koers Nieuw West). She met cultural and social organizations active in the district, she got to know about artists and initiatives, she corresponded with officials of Amsterdam City Hall and with various experts about the relationship between nature and the urban habitat and about the green future of the city as a whole. Wilde Westen, benefiting from the information and knowledge provided by Marjetica Potrč, was also focused on a campaign about cooking and farming in Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61 that could involve local residents and would suggest possible different uses of the fenced-off garden and former shop. They visited many local residents; they stayed for coffee or tea and a piece of cake. The idea of a possible change was also spread through flyers, by using the front window of the shop, by contacting social organizations in the area and by asking the housing corporations Far West (owner) and Rochdale (who maintain the garden) to contact the residents around the communal garden through an official letter.

Refurbishment, preparation
After the basic refurbishment was complete, Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen worked on the physical transformation of the former butchers by setting up a four-day workshop to turn the space into an efficient and comfortable kitchen. By assembling big wooden poles they created a cooking island with dishwasher, fridge, four camping cooking fires and a counter with two sinks. The dining island was composed of a long table, benches and a ladder giving access to the storage/mezzanine. The workshop also presented an opportunity to get in touch with the neighbours who came looking for information about the space and to help out. A second round of physical interventions took place right before the project opened; the soil in the garden needed sampling and this was executed by the artist Wapke Feenstra, invited to contribute to the project with research about the culture of farming. The Praktijkschool helped out by preparing the garden, and in accordance with our idea of dividing the plot into 1.5 x 1.5 pixels, planted Tagetes to design the grid. Grass tiles replaced some of the concrete tiles around the kitchen building, forming a small path which led up to the threshold of the garden. The front window of the kitchen got a makeover in the form of the new logo of the Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbour covering the former sign of the butcher’s shop. Combining the old sign with the new logo spoke of the desire to preserve the history of the place, whilst reinventing a different use for it in the present time.

Opening
The kitchen and the garden officially opened with a housewarming party on April 18th, 2009. Guests of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam mixed with locals who’d been invited to the event via posters, flyers and personal invitations, spread around the neighbourhood. Everyone was invited to participate in initiatives organised especially for the occasion: writing their names on tags to paste on the front window in order to illustrate the project’s far-reaching network; children asked to plant an apple tree in front of the kitchen door as a symbol of fertility and a metaphor for a project in progress; tours conducted of the garden which explained the ideas behind the grid and ways to use pixels to design vegetable gardens; brainstorming with Wapke Feenstra about the art of cultivating and the use of the garden; booking one or more pixels of garden to care for and cultivate; entertainment with food produced by local and independent initiative Dora’s Kitchen and music by Rag2Riches. The Stedelijk Museum curator Leontine Coelewij, Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen, and the councillor of art and culture of the Stadsdeel Geuzenveld en Slotermeer, Tys de Ruijter, stepped up to the podium to announce the launch of the project.

Workshops
After the opening 22 families from more than 7 ethnic groups got their own vegetable gardens and The Cook, the Farmer his Wife and their Neighbour got its gardener: Roy. They immediately started preparing the soil and seeding as it was already late in the season. They planted all sorts of vegetables according to their cooking habits and tastes. At that time the garden was open three days a week and the kitchen four days a week to local inhabitants and visitors from the city centre and elsewhere who had come to see the project or to participate in workshops organised by Wilde Westen. These workshops functioned as a powerful tool to encourage local inhabitants in particular to take the initiative and develop new ideas in the garden and the kitchen. The range of workshops varied from multicultural cooking (Dora’s Kitchen, Taji the Chef workshops), permaculture practice (Free State SWOMP workshop), theatre and improvisation for kids (Marina Breton workshop), designing with recycled material (LDSP workshop), to stalking and producing urban food (Wietske Maas workshop). The opening of these two spaces had been a great achievement: local inhabitants enjoyed meeting up with their neighbours in a pleasant and protected environment. They started sharing ideas on cooking and farming; a new community had started to form.

Cooks and Farmers forming Committee
By the summer of 2009 many people were happily gathering and sharing in the garden and in the kitchen. The need had arisen for a clearer and better organisation of this newly formed community partly to ensure it ran smoothly, but also because the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam was due to withdraw its financial and logistic support (5 September 2009). Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen encouraged those participating local inhabitants to create a ‘dwellers committee’. They discussed together what the committee could do: they made democratic decisions about the management of the garden and the kitchen, about the organisation of activities, about opening times, and about their relationship with the owner - the housing corporation Far West. So the committee was formed in August 2009 and was composed of 8 members: Aisha, Costa, Eptisam, Gerda, José, Latifa, Mostapha (on behalf of the kids) and Roy.

Harvest Party
In consultation with local inhabitants, the committee decided to organise a party to celebrate the harvest. Unlike the opening party in which the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam had a great role, the harvest party was devised entirely by residents in collaboration with Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen. They applied to the Stadsdeel Geuzenveld en Slotermeer for funding and planned to set up a fair to showcase the products of the cultivated garden and the various outcomes of the garden and kitchen initiatives. The fair was also meant to propose possible future initiatives, and to create a cosy ambience in one of the few bucolic places in New West Amsterdam. During the fair, the kitchen produced Surinam, Moroccan, Iranian and Dutch food round the clock and immediately outside you could find booths distributing candies, lemonade and delicious cous-cous. In the garden you could meet Wietske Maas and learn how to prepare and smoke fish from the Sloterplas lake. Costa and Aisha gave lessons on preserving vegetables from the garden. Ouardia presented a workshop on henna hand tattooing. Further entertainment was provided especially for kids in the form of a gigantic inflatable cow - but also for all tastes, a yoga class with Ria van Leeuwen, a Bollywood and belly-dancing performance, a vegetable lottery, a small exhibition of the outcomes of the various workshops realised and a DJ set managed by children.

Future
The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbour has developed and grown out of the enthusiastic participation and active contribution of more than 100 people who embraced farming and cooking as a way of sharing knowledge and tradition at a time when demolition and redevelopment are causing many to feel uprooted. It proved beyond a doubt that inhabitants care about their neighbourhood and that by appropriating these two spaces they have developed a sense of belonging to this part of the district. This has also brought security to Lodewijk van Deysselstraat and added real value to the neighbourhood.
The project no longer needs our mediation; it can now live and progress by itself. We will be more effective in the neighbourhood if we are able to operate on a larger scale; we have to move on, and to strengthen the character of the place by extending our vision of re-appropriation to the entire street of Lodewijk van Deysselstraat and to the neighborhood Geuzenveld en Slotermeer beyond. To ensure the sustainable redevelopment of the area, the active participation of its inhabitants is not only important but also fundamental.

PUBLICATION The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor IS NOW OUT!!

Opening! 18 April 2009, in Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61, Amsterdam.

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Announcement of the Opening

Marjetica Potrc and Wilde Westen welcome you to join the house warming party taking place on Saturday 18th April 2009, in Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61, from 15.30 to 19.00.Read also what our friends of Freestate SWOMP are saying about us!

The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor

Marjetica Potrc and Wilde Westen 18 April to 5 September 2009 Amsterdam Nieuw West

The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor, a participatory project by the Slovene artist and architect Marjetica Potrc and Wilde Westen - a group of young designers, architects and cultural producers -, combines visual art and social architecture to redefine the village green. Community vegetable gardens become a tool by which the residents of Amsterdam Nieuw West reclaim ownership of their neighbourhood at a time when demolition and redevelopment are causing many to feel uprooted. In the 1950s, the garden city of Nieuw West was constructed on former farmland as a modernist project; today this Amsterdam suburb is one of the largest residential redevelopment sites in Europe. With their project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, Potrc and Wilde Westen, in collaboration with the residents of the multicultural Geuzenveld-Slotermeer district, reflect on this history and celebrate a return to local food production. Here, farming and cooking are viewed as a way for people to share knowledge and traditions, and a means for the cultural renewal and rebirth of the neighbourhood. Beginning April 18, 2009, the house at Lodewijk Van Deysselstraat 61, in Slotermeer, will be a meeting point open to the Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbours, friends and guests, as well as those involved in the many local initiatives already taking place in Nieuw West.The project is realized in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, within the initiative Stedelijk Goes West.

Statement of Marjetica Potrč

The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor is a collaborative project in the Nieuw West neighborhood of Amsterdam; initiated by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it was designed and organized by Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen, a group of architects, artists, designers and cultural producers. The project consists of a community vegetable garden and a community kitchen, which are used by residents of the neighborhood and which, we hope, will remain in place even after the Stedelijk program comes to an end in September. We see the opening of the project on April 18 as the start of a process of transformation for the neighborhood: the garden and the kitchen provide the people who live in the area with a way to redefine their relationship to public space and the public sphere. A previously unused site at Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61 was acquired on a temporary basis from the Far West construction company; the building that houses the community kitchen also serves as a meeting place, and the vegetable garden is located behind the kitchen.

A grant from the Netherlands Architecture Fund allows us to present the community garden and kitchen as a case study in a publication that re-imagines the role of green spaces in the Dutch garden city, a modernist planning model developed in the postwar years. The project has tremendous potential: not only are we working closely with residents to redefine the public space, but we are also acting as mediators between residents and the municipality authorities to change the way public space is perceived and managed in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam’s Nieuw West neighborhood is a famous modernist development that was conceived by architect Cornelis van Eesteren before World War II but constructed after it. Today, immigrants from Turkey and Morocco account for more than half of area’s population. The problems and challenges the neighborhood faces are the same as those of aging modernist residential developments throughout the European Union – in particular, unemployment and the non-integration of recent arrivals. Nieuw West is, moreover, one of the largest residential redevelopment areas in the EU, a situation that has led to the continual resettlement of families: when immigrants are forced to move a second time, it becomes especially difficult for them to build community. The vegetable garden helps give residents a sense of connection to place as they work the land in a neighborhood that experiences constant population shifts. Both the garden and the community kitchen create bonds within the community (residents give the kitchen half of their produce from the garden) and become a catalyst for transforming not only the public space but also the community itself.

A mere half-century ago, the area of Nieuw West was farmland. The postwar modernist garden city included large green public spaces, which, however, eventually turned into no-man’s lands, dividing and alienating the residents. Some of the green spaces were fenced off and the residents were not permitted to enter them, thus signaling the death of modernist planners’ ideal of a shared democratic space. The project The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor opens one of these fenced-off yards to residents, who reclaim the space by growing vegetables on its land. The project uses horticulture and the different cuisines of the multicultural neighborhood to create stronger community ties and build firmer relationships between the residents, the space, and the greater society.

On a larger scale, the project redefines the relationship between rural and urban knowledge. After the predominant status of urban culture in the late twentieth century, societies today are redefining the urban–rural relationship for a variety of reasons. The European Union faces challenges that arise from the aging of the population and increasing migration. The old administrative unit of the national state, a concept inherited from the nineteenth century, is being transformed into regions with the emphasis on the local. More generally, the EU, like the rest of the world, is having to develop strategies that address global warming and, most recently, the economic crisis of 2008. All these things demand the involvement of citizens in redefining the social contract and creating a new understanding of citizenship.

The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor is an example of both “redirective practice,” where people from various disciplines and backgrounds come together to forge new knowledge, and “participatory design,” in which the people who are most directly affected – the residents of Nieuw West – are themselves involved at all stages of the project’s development. The project brings together neighborhood residents, individuals and groups (Marjetica Potrč, Wilde Westen, and many other organizations), and institutions (the Stedelijk Museum, Far West, the Netherlands Architecture Fund, etc.); by being involved in the project they create positive change in the neighborhood and redefine how we live together. We look forward to seeing the project develop and expand to other communities in Amsterdam and beyond. It’s all about social architecture!

Marjetica Potrč, May 2009

Initiators

Marjetica Potrc

Marjetica Potrc studied in her native city of Ljubljana, first as an architect and later as a visual artist. Her way of working follows a movement in the art world that places an emphasis on interactivity and participation, often with a social orientation. In recent years, she has carried out projects in Caracas (Venezuela), Rajasthan (India) and New Orleans (USA). She often works in collaboration with local communities and usually focuses on daily life in the city, on living and infrastructure. Potrc seeks out practical solutions for everyday problems, such as water and electricity supply. One example of her approach is the “Dry Toilet”, which she developed in informal city of Caracas, is one of a series of community-focused on-site projects by Potrc that are characterized by participatory design and a concern with sustainability issues, particularly in relation to energy and water infrastructures. Her preparatory drawings increasingly form an important part of her oeuvre;she has been invited by Daniel Birnbaum to display a large selection of her drawings at the Venice Biennale this year. Potrc won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2000 and exhibited her work in the accompanying exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.---Wilde Westen

Wilde Westen is a collective group of young designers, architects and cultural producers. By combining different disciplines they initiate open, dynamic and participatory processes that respond to urban and social needs of cities in transition.Their interdisciplinary work is focused on reactivating urban spaces by involving inhabitants in order to reimagine urban renewal and how we live together].Their latest project is The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbor, which is realized in collaboration with Marjetica Potrc and is about a community garden and a community kitchen in Amsterdam West (The Netherlands). The members of Wilde Westen are: Lucia Babina/iStrike.ultd, Reinder Bakker and Hester van Dijk/ Overtreders-W, Merijn Oudenampsen, Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg/Ooze and Henriette Waal.Lucia Babina is a cultural producer with specific interests on how culture and art can affect urban areas. Her projects produce visions, interpretations and actions that are affecting the way we see, use and inhabit the urban realm. She is founder of iStrike foundation in Rotterdam, an environmental organization aimed at creating multidisciplinary platforms of analysis, comparison, and international exchange. She is co-founder of Cohabitations Strategies, a cooperative for socio-spatial development, with which she has been developing projects at international level.

Ooze is an international practice engaged in art, architecture and urban projects. Ooze strives to create environments which can be perceived in various subjective ways. The different meanings that can be given to our interventions create openness and are able to integrate users. We want to give various users the freedom to occupy a room, a building or a piece of the city and to develop it further in their own way. We strive to start processes which lead to informal spatial solutions. We have been applying our strategy to public spaces ranging from small to large scale, such as exhibition spaces for TENT contemporary museum, Rotterdam, art installations for for Emscherkunst.2010, where our interventions integrate the observers spatially, a strategy for Amsterdam West, where we proposed initiatives to make informal economic activities visible, or architectural interventions in the port area of Ijmuiden that make use of different regional forces. We derive the drive for our projects from a thorough analysis of interpretations, narratives and inspirations of the users of the space.

Merijn Oudenampsen is a free lance researcher, specializing in political and urban issues. He studied urban sociology and political science at the UvA in Amsterdam. His interests range from urban megaprojects, citybranding, the creative city to utopian architecture, social engineering and the postpoliticalness of it all. You can find his articles off- and online, in places such as de Groene Amsterdammer, Waterland, Open Cahiers, Mute Magazine, Metropolis M, and Archined. He is part of the platform Flexmens.org and intermittently (co-)organises conferences and debates, such as Vox Populi (KNAW, 2009) Migrant Media Metropolis (de Balie, 2008) en het Publieke Verlangen (de Balie, 2007).

Overtreders W (Tresspassers W) is spatial design studio, established by Reinder Bakker and Hester van Dijk. With their designs they strive to make people feel at home. 'Home' means different things: feeling at home deals with more than one's own house, it depends on the quality of other places you regularly visit, such as the street where your house is, the park around the corner, the road you take when going to work, your office or the hospital you go to cure a broken leg. These secondary home places are what Overtreders W work on. Our designs make space for the dreams and ambitions of people living there. Projects done by Overtreders W are The Cook, the Framer His Wife and their Neighbour (in cooperation with WIlde Westen, 2009), Visitors Centre" de Oostvaarders" (Almere, 2009) and bicycle tunnel "Pixelpoort" (Zaandam, 2009).

Henriette Waal is a public space researcher and designer interested in local culture and cultural signs in relation to the public domain. In her projects Waal combines on-site fieldwork with a strongly conceptual approach.The result can manifest itself as a new spacial use. Besides physical interventions she produces image, film and text. Currenty she is researching the relation between food and the city in different projects. In a recent project in Tilburg (NL) she developed an outside brewery as a tool for a drinkable landscape together with the homebrewers of that area.